QUAD wrote:Phantom is good if you are either pushing a forested area (think the flank of Highway to Hell, for instance) or are rushing an area with a Moto type deck.

Charlie Hornet is better than the A-10 because it can kill a superheavy in one pass. A-10 is good if they are spamming high end mediums or you manage to take out AA.

As some additions: Phantom is situational, but is an area-denial weapon. You can do everything from merely inconvenience to castrate the opening of another player with a good napalm run, and obviously flush out a lot of units. But I personally would take a Nighthawk over a Phantom in a general deck because the LGBs will have more utility. When you're NORAD Moto and you're not spending a lot of time in hedgerows and fields, Phantom can be a better investment than Nighthawk's LGBs.

A-10 is mainly good in 1v1s because the high armor can help negate AA, since there's not generally enough of it - and can help wade past stuff like Osa spam. In team games on larger maps, this advantage gets negated because there's going to be plenty of good AA and the A-10 isn't going to be fast enough to get across the map in time to even get to your target.

The W:AB Noob wrote:And yes, I would go with F-15Cs rather than F-16 Blk 52s.

Definitely have to disagree here: Block 52s are objectively a better deal because their veterancy/availability, turn radius and loadout are far more cost efficient than the F-15C in a variety of environments. The F-15C still has the same loadout as the Viper (with two additional Sidewinders and some Vulcan ammo), but the 2@Rookie versus 2@Hardened really is no contest.

Those AMRAAMS on the Vipers are going to be hitting a lot more often than on the Ceagles - not to mention the former being ten points cheaper can mean a lot in smaller games.

In airborne they'd be even worse as you should have the slots to take all ASF at maximum veterancy. The reason you take block 52 over ceagle is that the vet bonus makes block stronger than ceagle despite the ECM loss. This is the case even if you increase their vets by one level each.

throwaway wrote:In airborne they'd be even worse as you should have the slots to take all ASF at maximum veterancy. The reason you take block 52 over ceagle is that the vet bonus makes block stronger than ceagle despite the ECM loss. This is the case even if you increase their vets by one level each.

I agree with that in case of small scale matches, but in games that last 1-2 hours quantity tends to matter more. Also units don't exist in a sterile environment and with some is easier to survive so they reach high levels.Leveling CEagles isn't really hard... I had games where 3 out of 4 CEagles got to elite status quite fast.

I also want to point out in regards to the nighthawk, with the upcoming nerf (?) to LGB accuracy, you may want to evaluate how the nighthawk acts after the patch. It is nice (and frustrating to those on the receiving end) to warp in with that stealth and delete a unit that's giving you trouble, but i was reading the forum topic about an upcoming nerf to LGB dispersion.I'm a fan of the napalm phantom, as it also has aa missiles in a pinch, and it has the most napalm bombs on a blufor loadout. Like others in this thread have mentioned, it's a good plane for area denial. Smokescreens can come in handy.

*Disclaimer: I haven't played US/Norad in a long time, and I'm away from the armory right now so I could have just completely lied about the phantom loadout.

JohnDaBarr wrote:I agree with that in case of small scale matches, but in games that last 1-2 hours quantity tends to matter more.

Blocks come in the same quantity so this doesn't matter.

As for leveling units up, you should never think of veterancy like that. First, for such expensive units it takes massive amounts of kills to level (I'd guess at least 150pts per rank or 600pt to elite). Second, by the time you've leveled you've already used the plane a lot. You can think of upvets as buying a certain amount of hits - e.g. the first 30 shots will have 15 misses at rookie and 5 misses at elite, so upvetting "buys" you 10 more hits but after that both planes reach equal vet. In games where you can handwave the extra 10 misses of a lower vet as a non-drawback, your deck choices don't matter much.

And in the particular case of ceagle vs block, you're proposing taking those extra misses just so that at the end of the game, when both block and ceagle are elite, you can have a slightly stronger ASF in the ceagle. The misses early game to me seem far more important than the 10% ecm late game, even before we consider that by the time your ceagle is elite there will be no more planes left to shoot down.